[entropicgravity]

I ran into a similar situation not long ago on the system partition of a linux installation. The partition was too small to begin with and as new updates piled up there was almost no space left to start deleting stuff. It took me about half an hour to find a subdirectory with a tiny bit of stuff that could be deleted. It was like being in a room so plugged up with junk that you couldn't open the (inward swinging) door to let yourself out.

From the tiny beginning I started being able to delete bigger and bigger spaces until finally it was clear and then of course I resized the partition so that wouldn't happen again. The End.

[dataflow]

Confused, why didn't you just expand the partition to begin with?

And I feel like that ought to be the lesson for power users: always leave a bit of slack space after your partition.

[entropicgravity]

My recollection is that gparted wouldn't allow me to adjust any partitions until I loosened up the available space in the system partition. I guess gparted checks all the partitions to make sure everything is as it should be before it allows changes.